Growing with a Walled Garden – 5 Building Blocks Towards a Strategy

Flock Media roundtable on 1st Nov 2018: Walled Gardens

Flock ran an event on 1^st Nov 2018 for media experts from across sectors including retail, automotive, drinks and public sector. The topic was;

‘‘Whilst the Google and Facebook duopoly is being challenged by Amazon, the walled gardens that all 3 tech giants operate offer opportunities and threats to advertisers. The data and reach for targeting audiences is unprecedented but achieving a full view of the customer journey across the walled gardens is challenging. Marketing transformation requires maximising the opportunities with these players’’

The Key takeaways were:

1. Go for it! – Maximise relevant opportunities within the walled gardens and learn, learn, learn. It’s not all about audience measurement and attribution across the Web! The diverse range of walled gardens offer media and tech opportunities that can be exploited by Brands across all sectors E.g. McDonald’s

• Is your agency evangelizing opportunities proactively? E.g. Amazon Brand Stores and Amazon Advertising products
• Is your agency keeping you up to speed with emerging wall gardens and developments with audience targeting, measurement and attribution?

2.Learn ‘n’ apply – Capture insights and learnings from walled gardens; from audience targeting, personalization and customer journey messaging and apply on the ‘open’ Web to raise the bar with your Digital marketing  

• Is your marketing department distributing & applying these shared learnings?

3. Analyse customer journeys – Deploy attribution measurement – deterministic and probabilistic – outside of walled gardens to understand customer journeys and the path to purchase more effectively. The limited scope for attribution measurement will be valuable in combination with analysis of the customer journeys within walled gardens even if there is an attributable overlap of targeted audiences

• Review vendors on a 6 monthly basis and test new tools e.g. Multi Touch Attribution

4. Support industry initiatives – Get involved with independent vendors who are promoting independent offerings and working with industry-wide initiatives on IDs

• Be an industry leader and inspire all your stakeholders

5. Get under the skin of Marketing data privacy – GDPR introduction phase has started to calm down. Are Brand stakeholders fully briefed on what data can be and can’t be deployed for targeting and messaging purposes?

• Collaboration with Legal colleagues, Compliance specialists and industry bodies is a positive step towards working with customer data

If you’d like to hear more on our Media services, please get in touch with Julie at Julie.Marshall@flock-associates.com